“You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair . . . This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity — not just legal equity but human ability — not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”
The above quote is how President Lyndon B. Johnson laid out the concept of affirmative action in a speech at Howard University in June of 1965.
The purpose of the policy, first set in motion through an executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy, was to ensure fairness in the hiring process while also recompensing African-Americans and other minorities for centuries of mistreatment and discrimination.
Over the past half-century, the Supreme Court has struggled to define the limits of affirmative action.
In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the justices ruled that quotas set aside for minority applicants equated to a discrimination of the majority. Today, although universities cannot set quotas for minorities, they can consider race and the institution’s diversity as a factor in determining admissions.
Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled once again on an affirmative action case.
In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the court ruled 6-2 in favor of a Michigan referendum that bans race-based admissions policies at the state’s institutions of higher education. In this ruling the justices made clear that the place for decisions on affirmative action policies is the ballot box and not the courtroom.
In light of this decision, more states should take to the ballot box to put an end to race-based admissions policies. Affirmative action is not the proper policy tool to achieve “equality as a right and as a result.”
In a famous paper, University of Chicago economist Thomas Sowell found that in many cases minorities admitted to elite universities based on affirmative action policies found themselves unprepared for the high standards. Sowell argued that these students may have been more successful at less competitive institutions.
Sowell’s point was not that minorities were less capable than their peers, but instead that when an individual is admitted to a university on any factor other than his intellectual ability, she or he may not be properly prepared for the rigors of that institution.
It is true that in states where the use of affirmative action in admissions policies has been banned, minority representation at state universities has declined. However, the goal should not be to simply have more diversity at our public institutions; it should be to have equal opportunity regardless of diversity.
We should scrap affirmative action admission policies for alternatives that ensure all students receive a quality education starting in kindergarten.
We can begin by reforming the process by which we allocate funds for our public schools.
Currently many states employ regressive funding policies, in which education funds flow away from the schools that are most in need. This absurd reality is largely the result of basing school district funding on income and property taxes. Districts whose residents have the highest income and the most valuable property receive the most funding.
In order to achieve truly equal opportunity, we should act affirmatively to make sure every school district in the country, regardless of income or racial majority, receives necessary funding.
Orion Wilcox is a senior economics major from Bay St. Louis.
